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In most companies I know, enterprise-wide architecture models are designed by a few enterprise architects and are typically not widely accepted by developers. Today, agile solution teams and enterprise architects are separated by huge walls of ignorance and misunderstanding. Enterprise architects (EAs) manage their repository of artifacts and build to-be roadmaps. Solution teams do not care about the work of the EAs and do whatever their product owner wants them to do. Strong links between solution architecture and enterprise architecture seldom exist, which questions the use of the latter at its very core.

Trapped in the vortex of digital transformation, almost all industries are facing challenges caused by highly accelerated technology innovation cycles, new and disrupting competitors, and, last but not least, a tremendous amount of technical debt in their vast historically grown IT landscape.

To deal with this area of tension companies trust in ‘Agile’ gurus that tell them how they must change their organization and culture to become ‘agile’. If we look at the complexity of the application landscape of a typical company it becomes obvious that they simply can’t be agile without renovation projects that make their legacy IT agile.

What you should do:

Reduce your technical debt step by step by the renovation of your legacy IT. Agile IT landscapes make companies agile, not agile coaches that focus on culture and organizational aspects.

For sure, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is still a very immature, weakly defined field. Most of the methods, tools, and frameworks suit the requirements of real-world projects only to a small degree. Most of the elements EAM tries to structure and manage towards a to-be state’ are abstract and hard to grasp. Archimate®, a modeling notation for EAM, for example, defines more than thirty elements, most of them are vague abstractions and far from tangible. In practice, EAM is much more focused on designing application landscapes than providing a holistic view of the enterprise. EAM is still very much about ‘application portfolio management’ that tries to minimize IT costs without alignment to the business capabilities.

But how can this sad situation be changed?

Our suggestion is to apply three values to your EAM practice: Read More

When Agile software development was born in 2001, it defined a set of four principles:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

I have worked in several Agile teams where ‘responding to change over following a plan,’ often got misinterpreted to mean “don’t have a plan.” Those teams often find they waste time by adapting too much.

‘An ivory tower architecture is one that is often developed by an architect or architectural team in relative isolation to the day-to-day development activities of your project team(s).The mighty architectural guru(s) go off and develop one or more models describing the architecture that the minions on your team is to build to for the architect(s) know best. Ivory tower architectures are often beautiful things, usually well-documented with lots of fancy diagrams and wonderful vision statements proclaiming them to be your salvation. Read More

Today I want to point to an article of Svyatoslav Kotusev, an independent researcher, who questions whether the Open Group Architecture Framework® (TOGAF®) is the industry standard framework that enterprise architects really deserve.

Typical deliverables and methods of current Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) practices are overwhelmingly complex. EAM tools often include hundreds of out-of-the-box diagrams. The two most common architectural meta-models provided by The Open Group® (ArchiMate®, TOGAF® Content Metamodel) are voluminous and consist of 30+ artifacts and 100+ potential relations between artifacts. Those meta-models are based on sophisticated meta-meta models but have severe issues with clarity. To illustrate this, let’s compare the way an application can be modeled with ArchiMate® with the artifact ‘Application’ of the Architectural Thinking Framework:

I have been working as a part of many Agile teams. In the beginning, whenever I introduced myself as an ‘Architect’ colleagues became mistrustful and started to perceive me as the breakman of the team. For that reason, I would never name myself an ‘architect’ again. It seems as if many hardcore agilists perceive architecture as the enemy of Agile. But is that true?

Companies are in an uncomfortable position today. On the one hand, the digital transformation is forcing them to innovate at an increasing pace. On the other side, they run on a historically grown legacy IT and huge technical debt. The past is cemented into the vast existing application landscape, but the future requires a rapid transformation. For this reason, innovation methods such as “Design Thinking” and the ideas of the agile organization have gained massive popularity in recent years. It is hard to find a larger company that does not run an ‘Open Innovation Space’ where people innovate and build prototypes, and that is a good thing in principle. The only problem is, however, that companies usually do not steer their innovation initiatives towards a big picture.

Enterprise Architecture is still a mystical discipline, ruled by vague frameworks, surrounded by the fog of bloated concepts providing only little practical advice.

Let’s hand over to our friend, Nemanja Kostic who provides a humorous overview about the state of the practice. He makes suggestions that discuss how to demystify Enterprise Architecture,. This suggestions are quite compatible with our vision of Architectural Thinking.